Solar Calf — Patrick Belaga

Nobody needed another record about video games. Patrick Belaga made one about their maps instead. Solar Calf, out July 31 on PAN, is his second solo album and is built as a place rather than a sequence: nine zones, with transitional passages doing the work a chorus usually does. The reference is the geography of the Zelda series, its dungeons and forest enclaves and mountain villages, not Koji Kondo's themes. Belaga is a classically trained cellist, and the palette is woodwind, brass, piano, strings and percussion played live, then re-sampled and cut against itself in the DAW until the natural flow breaks. “Lake” is marimba and cello at almost Balearic tempo. “Upsurge” takes a calm forest theme apart.